Clearing up is no joke. We, the Vielfalt in Schulen or, in brief, ViS project team, are currently faced with photographs, magazines, books, and documents without end, as well as all the rest of the stuff that has piled up in our offices over the last three years. What shall we do with it all? Which things are of interest and viable in the museological sense?

Well, action alone gives rise to answers. So we dug in and made a start.
Our colleague Roman Labunski first devoted his energy to the fascinating issue of how images are archived at the Jewish Museum Berlin. Then he turned up again at our door and asked: “So, tell me again, who are the people in these photos?” or “Who took this photograph?” The images are now in the care of Stefanie Haupt, the person in charge of our documentary photo stocks, and will eventually end up in the Museum’s databank. All our team members live in hope that future inquiries will be few and far between.

How does the conclusion of a long process look? Answer: like the few forthcoming publications. Rosa Fava just completed the final proofread of our brochure Promoting Intercultural Openness in Schools. It will be published online, an entire batch will go to the education department, a single copy to each of the other departments. The report (in German) on our “Schools and Museums in the Migration Society” conference of 13/14 October 2014 is alreday online for your perusal here.

Plan farewells. Yes, do not underestimate this point. It will be complicated because we didn’t leave at the end of January, as originally planned, but have instead extended the project for a period of one or two months. Rosa Fava will leave at the end of February, Meral El, yours truly, at the end of March while Roman Labunski will switch to the Museum’s administration department on 1 March.
Why was the project extended? To wrap things up! For instance, the project website must be integrated in the Museum’s web presence in a way such that it will continue to make sense even without further input from the team.

To clear up and conclude one’s business makes sense
…as the in-house info meeting on 8 January 2015 clearly showed. For the first time ever, a considerable number of colleagues turned up. It seems interest in our work has peaked just as we are about to end it. But we will coordinate two Diversity Trainings for colleagues still—and fifteen of them signalized interest in the workshop even before word went out officially . Three years of ViS are almost over. February 2015 marks the official end of the project. All that remains now is to bid our farewells!

Beit is the name of a European project thought up by David Stoleru, a Jewish architect from France. The name refers to the Hebrew word for house “Bajit” as well as to the letter “Bet” of the Hebrew alphabet. Stoleru has designed small timber houses that are somewhat reminiscent of the cozy beach basket chairs common on Germany’s Baltic coast. Seen from the side, they resemble the symbol ב for Bet, the first letter of the word beit. Several classes of eighth-graders set up such houses in the Heckmann Höfe in the Mitte district of Berlin, as a means to temporarily bring into the public sphere their nearby school, whose Hebrew name, Beit Sefer, literally means “House of the Book.” Here, for two days, they devoted themselves to the task of uncovering traces of the Jewish community in the local cultural and urban heritage.

It proved to be a strenuous two days’ work, during which the schoolchildren were almost constantly on the go and often had to push themselves to their limits. They filmed traces of history and asked themselves what these have to do with their present-day lives. They confronted passers-by with their questions about the locality. And they also had to deal with the process of opening up to one another, as one aspect of the project was to promote exchange between Jewish and non-Jewish schoolchildren. The thirteen-year olds found it difficult to work with partners they had only just met. We project supervisors were therefore frequently obliged to split up good friends, so as to give new constellations a chance to develop.

It was always a struggle for the kids to speak to passers-by and get them to agree to an interview. Yet once they had succeeded, they rose to the challenge, assuming their respective roles of camerawoman, assistant, interviewer, and director as a professional team.

And rising to the challenge proved worthwhile: in the Jewish cemetery in Große Hamburger Street, in front of a commemorative plaque for the civilian victims who were buried there in unmarked graves in 1945, the schoolchildren questioned passers-by about the war. One interviewee from Cologne turned out to be a witness to that era, having lived through the Berlin Blitz as a child. Another contemporary witness ran into us in the courtyard of the former Jewish orphanage in August Street. A neighbor, an elderly lady we met in the courtyard, told us about the professional training she received in the building in the 1970s, in what was then East Germany (the GDR).

Those two days of open-air schooling left their mark also on the passers-by. One woman interviewed wrote to us: “Cordial greetings also to your devoted schoolchildren. To meet such young people with such unbridled enthusiasm was a great joy to me.” Our efforts were well worthwhile!

Tomorrow, on Tuesday 24 September 2013, at 5:30 p.m., the closing ceremony of the Beit Project will take place in the Great Hall of the Jewish Museum Berlin (Old Building, second level). A screening of the video-interviews will be followed by a podium discussion between several schoolchildren and the following guests:

Arnold Dreyblatt, artist and musicologist, who works inter alia on the theme of remembering
Regina Scheer, eyewitness, journalist, and author of the book Ahava. Das vergessene Haus (Ahava. The Forgotten House)
Corinna Tell, art historian, and an active member of the not-for-profit association “Denk mal an Berlin e.V.,” where she is responsible for youth projects

The podium discussion will be chaired by Ulrike Wagner, who works at the Jewish Museum Berlin on the project “Vielfalt in Schulen” (Diversity in Schools)
Entrance is free.

Some may ask themselves why, from May 29 to June 1 at the Jewish Museum Berlin, there was a little exhibition of students’ work that had nothing to do with ‘Jewish subjects.’ I would like to answer this question: since last summer, we have been working with three Berlin schools to reinforce positive ways to handle ‘diversity‘ as well as cultural heterogeneity. We advocate creative forms of work that offer the possibility for individual development. That is why we gave the schools an opportunity to conceive with their students of an exhibition that would actually be shown in the museum. As an open-ended, overarching theme we chose ‘Time,’ in order to leave the participants with a lot of latitude.

As the project leader I was only seldom directly involved in the implementation. I was thus surprised and impressed by the diversity of themes and objects on display. Two pieces struck me in particular and I would like to share their stories:

In a workshop on showcase design, the students learned about how to tell a story with objects. A group of students – only boys – from the Ernst Schering School was supposed to bring objects that had something to do with the subject ‘school.’

They presented an ink eraser, a baseball cap, and a mobile phone. I understood the ink eraser’s connection to daily life at school. But what the latter two objects had to do with school I had yet to learn: it turned out they were things that you had better not be found with or have on. One of the students then replaced the phone with something he chose from our case of objects, an alarm clock. Now a team of three had to invent a story that would feature all three things. We were surprised by the dramatic tale they soon presented us with: one of the boys turned the mobile phone on and used it to play somber instrumental music. In a dark monotone voice he uttered the following story: “It is the 5th of May, 1995. Cihad overslept. He didn’t hear his alarm clock. He runs to school. They are taking a math test. He makes mistakes and wants to correct them, but his ink eraser is empty. Then someone steals his cap.”

For the exhibition, the boys developed the story further, adding more objects and symbolic ersatz sketches. From the minimalist improvised story an elaborate poem emerged. Texts and objects found their place in a showcase. I find this bad-luck day at school the most amusing exhibit of the show.

On the other hand there is a photograph, shot by a student at the B. Traven High School, that I find sad. He has been in Germany for four months and at the school for three. The students of the so-called ‘welcome class’ photographed objects from their surroundings. The idea was to answer the question “Where do you live?” with pictures. In nearly all the pictures are objects – a plate of fries, a shovel with sand, pills, scissors, a comb, arranged variously on a muddy-brown table. Hardly any other objects appeared in these pictures. I thought to myself, in this street there must be a diner, a pharmacy, a playground, a hairdresser, and not much more. But one picture just showed a bare tabletop, nothing else. By chance, one of the boys who had taken this picture was standing next to me with a group of other students at the show’s opening on Wednesday. They were taking pictures with their cell phones of the photographs on the wall. I spoke to him and asked: “Why is there nothing else in that picture?” He looked at me and said: “There is nothing there. I have to walk for ten minutes before I reach a store. We live in a shelter.”

These are two examples of what can transpire, when students come to the museum in order to create an exhibition. The stories that their exhibits tell are so various that one cannot summarize them without ironing out their distinctiveness. In any case, though, the Jewish Museum’s motto applies well to this exhibition project: “Not what you expect.”